Mt. Gox BitCoin Exchange “Hosted On Thousands Of Servers All Around The World”

Max 'Beast from the East' Smolaks covers open source, public sector, startups and technology of the future at TechWeekEurope.
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The world’s largest BitCoin exchange partners with Akamai for speed and security

Mt. Gox, the largest BitCoin exchange in the world, announced it has started hosting its services using the Akamai distributed computing network.

This means that the mtgox.com website is supported by thousands of servers all around the world, improving its security and performance.

The company has also moved to an entirely self-hosted model, allowing for more flexibility and giving it “full control of [its] data centre”.

In June, Mt. Gox temporarily suspended cash withdrawals in US dollars. The company said the two-week hiatus would allow it to improve the trading engine. Now, it has revealed that the engine codenamed ‘Midas’ is complete, and will be deployed “soon”.

Back on track

MtGox was established in 2010 as Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange – a platform for trading collectible game cards – but its focus soon shifted to transactions in alternative online currency. Meanwhile Akamai, founded by a group of MIT scientists in 1998, runs one of the world’s largest distributed-computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15 and 20 percent of all web traffic.

The partnership between the two will allow Mt. Gox to connect to its customers on a local level. “Not only does this massively increase our protection, but since the transition the performance and speed of mtgox.com has been greatly improved,” said the company in a statement.

The exchange has also confirmed that its new BitCoin trading engine is almost ready for release. According to Mt. Gox, Midas is currently being tested at over 500,000 trades per second, and is capable of processing an even larger number of transactions. The company says it is engaging new partners and financial institutions to make deposit and withdrawal beyond the trading engine faster and more convenient.

At the same time, it is trying out new user interface features based on community feedback, and getting ready to integrate with Litecoin, a BitCoin alternative.

In the future, Mt. Gox plans to act as a BitCoin champion, promoting the virtual currency. “Our mission as always is to support the widespread adoption of Bitcoin as much as we can. To accomplish the latter goal, we have a team focused on communicating the beauty of Bitcoin to the world with new websites and ad campaigns aimed at global markets.”

Akamai is a CDN for video and other static content. So, (i’m guessing) mt. gox isn’t expanding their general site compute power but rather decentralizing their json based price ticker. With bitcoin traders wanting the latest bitcoin prices, i’m guessing their ticker url would experience bottlenects quiet frequently.